With the rapid development of the economy, the strength of mainland enterprises is also getting stronger and stronger, and in the Fortune Global 500 list, the number of shortlisted companies has surpassed that of the United States and ranked first in the world. Of course, not only in terms of quantity, but also in quality. In recent years, the mainland has attached great importance to scientific and technological research and development and innovation, and has invested a lot.
According to the data, in 2020, the mainland's R&D investment reached 2,439.31 billion yuan, an increase of more than 1 trillion yuan over 2015, and the growth rate was very fast. In December last year, the top 2500 companies with global R&D investment were released, and the United States ranked first with 779 companies, followed by 683 companies in China, and the gap was not very large, of which Huawei ranked second in the world.
With the emphasis on scientific and technological innovation, the mainland has achieved technological breakthroughs in many fields, especially in the fields of 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other fields, and the mainland is not lagging behind the United States. The gradual strengthening of scientific and technological strength has made the United States feel pressure, so it has taken a series of blocking measures.
Huawei, as a representative of mainland technology companies, has invested a lot of money in chips in the past 10 years and achieved very good results, but this has been suppressed by the United States. In order to crush the best technology company on the mainland, not only did Huawei's access to the US market be restricted, but even other companies cooperating with Huawei were restricted. TSMC does not produce chips for Huawei, resulting in a sharp decline in Huawei's mobile phone sales, and Huawei's revenue in 2021 decreased by more than 200 billion yuan.
However, Huawei has not been crushed, but resisted the pressure, comprehensive attack, has launched the Hongmeng, Euler system, as of now, the number of global HarmonyOS devices more than 320 million, becoming the world's third largest intelligent terminal operating system, it can be said that the achievement is extraordinary. In addition, Huawei has also formed five major legions to march into multiple businesses. I believe that it will not be long before Huawei will rise again.
In addition to Huawei, the United States has also pulled many Chinese companies into the "blacklist" in the past few years, restricting the provision of technical services and so on. Now, another tech giant is being targeted and could be attacked by the United States at any time.
According to The British Reuters news agency, the United States is reviewing whether Alibaba's cloud computing business poses a risk, citing "national security", exactly the same excuse as the original investigation of Huawei.
As mentioned earlier, the development of the mainland in the field of cloud computing is not lost to the United States, of which Alibaba Cloud is in the leading position in the world, the third in the world, and the largest cloud computing vendor in Asia.
As early as 2009, Ali entered the field of cloud computing, led by Wang Jian and supported by Ma Yun. After investing huge amounts of money and manpower, Alibaba Cloud has gradually achieved results, cooperating with more and more customers, and increasing revenue. It will exceed 60 billion yuan by 2020 and is expected to reach 80 billion yuan in 2021, becoming one of Alibaba's fastest growing businesses.
Today's Alibaba Cloud has made many technological breakthroughs, such as its own development of Apsara, a super-large-scale universal computing operating system that serves the world, which can connect millions of servers around the world into a supercomputer to provide computing power to society in the form of online public services. Based on this operating system, Ali Wang jian was also successfully elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
In addition, in December last year, Alibaba Cloud won the first place in the four core evaluations of computing, storage, networking, and security, and for the first time, China's cloud surpassed international vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. I have to say that Alibaba Cloud's technology level is getting higher and higher.
How big is the role of Alibaba Cloud? We all know that every company today has a lot of data to store, and in the past, we had to rely on companies such as Oracle in the United States, not only to pay a lot of fees, but also to worry about data security. Since having Alibaba Cloud, it can basically be replaced. Alibaba Cloud has more than 4 million customers worldwide and a market share of nearly 50% in China, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Alibaba Cloud has saved more than 200 billion IT costs for the society.
In fact, Alibaba Cloud does not have much business in the United States, with an annual revenue of less than $50 million, and some cooperative companies such as Ford and IBM. The real purpose of the United States eyeing Alibaba Cloud is likely to be to limit its development, after all, in the field of cloud computing, there are already companies on the mainland that can compete with American companies, which is not inferior at all. Just like Huawei's leading level in 5G before, the United States has tried its best to pressure and persuade countries not to use Huawei 5G.
For the US market, Ali has also had reverie. In 2017, Ma Yun met with former U.S. President Trump to talk about exporting U.S. products to China through the Alibaba e-commerce platform and promising to create 1 million jobs for the United States. However, this wish was ultimately disappointed and did not come true.
Previously, after Huawei was suppressed by the United States, many people targeted Ali, Tencent, saying that these two companies have nothing to do, because there is no technical content, especially after Ali entered the community group purchase in 2020, the People's Daily commented that Internet companies should not stare at a few bundles of green vegetables, a few pounds of fruit, scientific and technological innovation is the sea of stars, many people criticize Ali.
In fact, Ali has a lot of technological innovation, Ali Damo Institute has also developed the first AI chip, and there are many achievements. Now it is being targeted by the United States, hoping that it will not be affected.